What Law Firms Can Learn From Samantha Bee And Her Centaur With Laser Eyes

“I am a Rap legend, just go ask the Kings of Rap / Who is the Queen and things of that Nature? / Look at my finger, that is a glacier, hits like a laser.” – Nicki Minaj

Last year, Vanity Fair published an article declaring that “a mix of new faces, shows, and platforms has only revitalized the [late night TV] format. Sam Jones photographs the top 10 reasons (all men, but that’s about to change, too) to tune in at the end of the day.” To no one’s surprise, the magazine cover for the article’s issue reflected its contents, but was far from representative of its audience.

Vanity Fair’s cover said it all without really having to say much. Eight white males and no females represented the “new faces” of late night TV. To many people, the cover looked quite ordinary and normal. After all, what is wrong with an image that showed off the uber-talented, affable, and entertaining hosts of late night TV? While others believed, at the very least, the 100 percent male, 80 percent white Vanity Fair image was tone-deaf. The magazine cover might as well been a microcosm of the legal industry.

In Vanity Fair’s defense, the magazine is simply reflecting the white-male-dominated nature of the late-night landscape. “Two female hosts plus the 10 men featured here is still a long way from a late-night that truly looks like America. But the next version of this story’s opening picture will be that much brighter,” writes the author, David Kamp.

It looked no different than many previous magazine covers in a variety of industries, but Samantha Bee had a unique perspective to make the cover better. In a Twitter response, Bee posted a photo-shopped version of the magazine cover with herself included as a muscle-bound centaur with lasers shooting out of her eyes and the caption “BETTER.”

Bee has backed up such thoughts with actions. In the January 2016 issue of New York Magazine and this month’s issue of Rolling Stone Magazine, Bee called out the industry and addressed the diversity crisis in entertainment head-on. Most notably, Bee’s team instituted a blind application process for hiring writers of her new late-night show, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. As Rolling Stone highlights:

Lo and behold, she ended up with a writers room that looked kind of like America: 50 percent female; 30 percent nonwhite. One of her hires had been working at the Maryland Department of Motor Vehicles…. ‘I have literally filled my office with people who have been underestimated their entire careers. To a person, we almost all fit into that category. It is so joyful to collect a group of people who nobody has ever thought could grasp the reins of something and f**king go for it.’

In her Rolling Stone interview, Bee jokes, “We don’t feel like we solved the diversity problem. We didn’t fix racism, quite. I mean, we almost did. We’ll see how things pan out. I’m feeling really good about it.” She may make jokes about the lack of diversity in her industry, but she is dead serious when confronting the diversity crisis in her industry.

What do your law firm’s conferences, happy hours, retreats, associate classes, and partner classes resemble? Are you reminded of Vanity Fair’s recent cover? If so, it may be time to become serious about the lack of diversity at your firm as well.

Vanity Fair promoted its article with the tweet, “We talked to all the titans of late-night television, and found out why it’s better than ever.” The photograph accompanying the article sadly revealed more of the same. I don’t believe it’s controversial to say that the legal industry will not be better by remaining a mirrortocracy.

Every day we see images of our profession — it bothers some more than others, but it is the current reality we all face. We can either address the lack of diversity in the legal industry head on or we can keep making excuses.

This month’s Rolling Stone interview with Samantha Bee revealed that she thought about becoming a lawyer at one point in her life. Maybe she could have influenced her law firm to implement a blind application process as one part of their recruiting strategy. It is only a matter of time before a major law firm has the vision and foresight to disrupt their current cookie-cutter OCI practices.

Law firms can keep talking about their commitment to diversity and that’s fine, but their actions say it all. If we as a profession continue to make little to no progress, then can we at least photo-shop our own version of a centaur with laser eyes into the ridiculously homogeneous images of our industry to point out the preposterous lack of diversity in the legal field?

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Renwei Chung is passionate about writing, technology, psychology, and economics. You can contact Renwei by email at [email protected], follow him on Twitter (@renweichung), or connect with him on LinkedIn.